Ronan Voss, 53, has made a quiet living as a small-batch beekeeper in western North Carolina for 12 years, ever since his ex-wife packed their furniture into a U-Haul and moved to Miami with a timeshare salesman. His only consistent social outings are weekly farmers’ market shifts and the occasional Rotary Club breakfast, and he’s stubbornly avoided anything resembling a date for a full decade, convinced he’s too set in his ways, too covered in bee stings most days, to hold anyone’s interest. He’s at the county’s annual summer street fair only to drop off a jar of his award-winning sourwood honey for the local fire department’s silent auction, planning to be back home in his cabin in time for the 9pm baseball highlight reel, when he rounds the corner by the shaved ice booth and slams right into someone carrying a frozen mango paleta.
Syrup drips bright orange down the front of his faded charcoal Carhartt overalls before he can react. He blusters out an apology, fumbling for the crumpled bandana in his pocket, when he looks down and recognizes the woman laughing so hard she’s snorting a little: Marisol Ruiz, his daughter’s high school art teacher, the one he’d only ever spoken to over Zoom during 2016 parent-teacher conferences, when his kid was a senior skipping class to paint murals on abandoned downtown buildings. She’s got sun-bleached streaks in her dark wavy hair, a smudge of clay under her left eye, and she’s wearing a cutoff flannel over a faded Ramones t-shirt, the same one his daughter used to borrow from her back in high school. She steps close before he can step back, dabbing at the syrup on his overalls with a paper napkin, her forearm brushing the sparse gray hair on his chest, and he can smell jasmine shampoo and lime seltzer on her breath when she says she still has the jar of honey his daughter brought her for teacher appreciation week that year, swears it’s the only thing that fixes her summer pollen allergies.
He offers to buy her a new paleta to make up for the one he broke, and she agrees, falling into step next to him as they push through the thick crowd of families and college kids home for the summer. Their shoulders keep brushing, the fabric of her flannel soft against his bare arm where his overalls strap has slipped down, and he keeps fighting the dumb, fluttery urge to reach out and tuck the stray piece of hair falling in her face behind her ear. He finds out she quit teaching last year, now runs a tiny pottery studio two blocks from the farmers’ market, and she’s been wanting to ask him for months if he sells raw beeswax to mix into her glazes, but she always got nervous walking up to his booth, said he looked like he was always in a hurry to pack up and get back to his hives. He’s torn, half of him screaming this is a bad idea—she was his kid’s teacher, 11 years younger, he hasn’t flirted with anyone since 2011— and the other half hanging on every word, laughing so hard at her story about a student who fired a clay mug out of a potato cannon that his sides hurt.
The first firework bursts red and gold over the treeline right then, painting the creek pink. She leans her head on his shoulder for three full seconds, soft and warm, before she pulls back, grinning, and says she has to head home before her roommate eats the carnitas tacos she left in the fridge. He walks her to her beat-up 2008 Subaru covered in pottery studio stickers, and she hands him a crumpled brown paper bag from her purse before she climbs in, says it’s a mug she threw last week, has a tiny bee etched into the handle, for his morning coffee. He stands in the parking lot waving until her taillights disappear around the curve of the road, then pulls the mug out of the bag, running his thumb over the rough, unglazed bee on the side.
